As the terrestrial digital television broadcasting standard, technologies such as digital video broadcasting (DVB), advanced television systems committee (ATSC), and integrated services digital broadcasting (ISDB) have been developed in Europe, America, and Japan, respectively.
In the terrestrial digital broadcasting, it is possible to provide a data broadcasting service obtained by superimposing various data on the main portion of a broadcasting program including AV content. For example, the notification of emergency information feat is necessary to report speedily can be performed using data broadcasting. Examples of the emergency information described herein include information regarding natural disasters including earthquake, tsunami caused by earthquake, typhoon, heavy rain, storm, tornado, flood, and forest fire, an occurrence of large-scale terrorism, a transportation operation condition (e.g. disturbance of the arrival and departure time of a school bus), information regarding school (e.g. change in the arrival and departure time at school, cancellation of class, and closure caused by prevalence of infections diseases), and other various administrative services.
In the ISDB, a signal for transmitting an emergency alert that serves as am emergency alert information descriptor is defined in a program management table (PMT) packet of the program-specific information. For example, the digital broadcasting receiver has been developed that detects an alert target area from an emergency information descriptor in PMT included in emergency alert broadcasting and determines whether the current position is included in the alert target area of the emergency alert broadcasting, enabling fee user to intuitively recognise the target area, current area, and associated areas for the emergency alert broadcasting (e.g. refer to Patent Literature 1).
Furthermore, in the ATSC mobile/handheld (M/H) that allows an ATSC broadcasting service to be received by mobile devices, it is possible to transmit alert information by adding the emergency alert table (EAT-MH) to the service-signaling channel. For example, fee broadcasting signal receiver has bees developed that continues to output an emergency alert even during the intra-cell handover by the use of EAT information contained in the broadcasting signal and channel information of a cell (e.g. refer to Patent Literature 2). In this case, the EAT information contain a cell indicator, and the channel information of a cell contains virtual channel information of the cell.